Eliza Clark reminds me of the girl you want to be friends with in preschool. She’s full of reckless self-confidence and strange and interesting facts learned from an older sibling. She can climb trees and other things just as good as the boys can, and she has the prettiest doll on show-and-tell day. She’s a little bit of everything, and you wish you could be that free and brave.

But then she sits you down and takes off the bandage to a cut she got in the process of trying to catch a frog. It’s full of pus, and there’s dried blood. You want to throw up, but you have to keep looking because somehow you think it’ll make you more like her.

That’s how I feel about Eliza Clark’s work. It seems braver and bolder than I ever could be, but the more I look at it, the grosser it seems. Welcome to Eliza Clark Land.

"SHE’S ALWAYS HUNGRY recognizes the myriad ways in which we all hunger for something, and Eliza Clark addresses them with unequivocal joy. She is a strange and thoughtful deity watching over a world gone mad."

SHE’S ALWAYS HUNGRY is made up of truly short stories that shine a light on different intense topics: eating disorders, alien plant life, perfecting one’s physical façade, Yelp reviews of a Chinese-Italian mashup restaurant. Okay, they are not ordinary topics. Food comes from strange forces, eating parasites help you get the body you’ve always wanted, and pills become part of a dangerous beauty regimen. The real subject under all these eccentric stories? Hunger. Plain old hunger. Whether you think of it as nourishment, desire, need, pleasure, helpful, hurtful, shameful or beautiful, the book looks at the ways in which humans search out sustenance.

Bleeding cacti aside, Clark exemplifies a certain visionary type of spirit when it comes to the stuff that makes us feel icky. The body and all its parts, its needs, and the ways in which we manipulate those trials of the flesh have been making headlines, with Ozempic, the film The Substance, and treatises on life after death that are coming from Paul Schrader and David Cronenberg. Clark is not afraid of the tender things, the terrifying things, that make us all human.

Each story offers up a seemingly normal protagonist who somehow gets twisted throughout their struggle to get what they need (or think they need). Writing an entire story in Yelp reviews is the kind of meta stuff that Clark deems a proper foundation for a proper story. And it is part of the everyday for millions of people. Every time we order from DoorDash, we are asked to tell them what we thought of the food, the experience, and the person bringing it to us. Clark feels the same about bodily functions --- who is doing what to fix whatever needs fixing, even if only in their perception, and what offers the most satiating answer to another question about hunger in any shape.

Amidst the gross details, there are stories about women and men, relationships with each other, parenting one or the other, learning to help each other and when to let go. The hunger that is at the heart of every possible interaction is the true plot to each of these stories. Even as space workers are attempting to solve ethnological issues in a future world, there is at the bottom of all the conversation a need to be heard, understood and answered to.

SHE’S ALWAYS HUNGRY recognizes the myriad ways in which we all hunger for something, and Eliza Clark addresses them with unequivocal joy. She is a strange and thoughtful deity watching over a world gone mad.